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Today, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) held a public meeting to consider the latest development in what has become a growing trend in the nuclear power industry – accelerating decommissioning by transferring licenses to third parties after a plant shuts down. The topic of today’s NRC meeting was to provide an overview of Entergy’s plan to sell and transfer the NRC licenses for the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Station – which permanently ceased operations at the end of 2014 – to NorthStar Group Services, Inc., a company that specializes in nuclear decommissioning and environmental remediation. This meeting began the process by which the companies seek NRC approval of the transaction.

Why would anyone want to buy a nuclear plant? Because they can decommission it faster, with more certainty in schedule and costs,that’s why. In the nuclear decommissioning business, time is literally money. NRC regulations allow up to 60 years for completion of decommissioning, and waiting is a pru…

The following is a guest post from Matt Wald, senior communications advisor at NEI. Follow Matt on Twitter at @MattLWald.

From the batteries in our cell phones to the clothes on our backs, "nanomaterials" that are designed molecule by molecule are working their way into our economy and our lives. Now there’s some promising work on new materials for nuclear reactors.

Reactors are a tough environment. The sub atomic particles that sustain the chain reaction, neutrons, are great for splitting additional uranium atoms, but not all of them hit a uranium atom; some of them end up in various metal components of the reactor. The metal is usually a crystalline structure, meaning it is as orderly as a ladder or a sheet of graph paper, but the neutrons rearrange the atoms, leaving some infinitesimal voids in the structure and some areas of extra density. The components literally grow, getting longer and thicker. The phenomenon is well understood and designers compensate for it with a …

The following is a guest post by Dr. Everett Redmond, NEI's Senior Director, Policy Development.

There’s a lot to like about the small modular reactor design that NuScale Power submitted yesterday to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Most often people talk about the ability to build such reactors in a factory and ship them by truck or rail, in nearly-finished form, to where they are needed, and to add generating capacity to a plant in modest increments, as demand grows. But it’s easy to overlook another strength of the NuScale design: one of its intrinsic features is a simple way to enhance the safety of the reactor fuel.

There’s a fancy name for this feature: a high surface-to-volume ratio. In plain English, as a container gets smaller, its surface area gets larger relative to its volume, a phenomenon obvious to anyone who cooks. Take a hardboiled egg out of the pot of boiling water and put it into a bowl of cold water, and the egg cools very quickly. It does that because the wa…

The following is a guest post by Matt Crozat, Senior Director, Business Policy at NEI.

Occupying less than a square mile along the busy Northeast Corridor between New York and Boston, it’s easy to miss the Millstone Power Station. A new economic impact study released today by NEI documents just how important the two-unit Dominion plant is to Connecticut and the region. Indeed, if Millstone were lost it would be dearly missed.

Millstone, owned and operated by Dominion Resources, provides almost 60 percent of the electricity consumed in Connecticut, and adds nothing to the region’s air pollution. In fact, it displaces fossil-fired plants, which would pollute.

But its role is felt even more deeply when one considers the economic value the plant generates. There are 1,569 full-time employees at the plant, in Waterford, but the economic activity they create supports an additional 1,691 jobs in the state and beyond.
But Millstone’s main role isn’t to provide employment, it is to produce …